Meet Impossible Foods’ lab-grown veggie burger. It bleeds

Slap an Impossible Foods’ burger on a grill,
and it pops, sizzles and smokes like a typical hamburger. But there’s
nothing typical about it. Instead of cow meat, it’s made of plant
products. Oh, and it was wholly engineered in a Silicon Valley lab.

“We look for each of those elements that make meat, meat,” said Celeste Holz-Schietinger, a principal scientist for Impossible Foods, during a tour of the company’s Redwood City, California, lab last week. “That little bit of fat leak-out. Those meaty, those roasty, those caramelized notes.”

Count Impossible Foods among a handful of tech startups hoping to convince you to eat meat and dairy substitutes. While Impossible Foods is focused on burgers, rival Beyond Meat sells everything from plant protein “beef crumbles” to chicken strips, and Hampton Creek offers up vegan mayonnaise called Just Mayo. The market for faux meat is expected to exceed $5 billion by 2020, according to global research firm MarketsandMarkets. On top of tofu, tempeh and other soy-based products, lab-grown food is estimated to take a big bite of this market.

Until now, the only place you could taste an Impossible Burger was at the upscale restaurant Momofuku Nishi in New York City (price: $12, for a burger with a side of fries). But the company said Wednesday it’s also expanding to three swanky California restaurants — Jardiniere ($16) and Cockscomb ($19) in San Francisco and Crossroads Kitchen ($14) in Los Angeles. Rather than marketing to vegans and vegetarians, Impossible Foods is making a play for foodies and meat eaters.

“Our ultimate goal is to make it
accessible to people who love meat and love burgers,” said Impossible
Foods CEO Pat Brown, a former Stanford biochemistry professor who
founded the company in 2011. “The really hard thing to do is deliver the
deliciousness that people love so much.”

Impossible Burgers are made from a handful of ingredients, including wheat protein, potato protein and coconut oil. Many of these products have been used in veggie burgers before, so the Impossible Burger’s real secret sauce is a substance called leghemoglobin, or “heme” for short. It’s this heme that makes the burgers bleed.

Heme, the secret sauce

Outside
Impossible Foods’ pristine, white lab, I watched as Holz-Schietinger
gave a demonstration of how the company makes its burgers. “First step
is to take the heme protein to the wheat protein and mix it in,” she
said, combining the two ingredients in a glass bowl and then giving them
a light stir.

Next she added potato protein and coconut oil. The blended mixture took on a pinkish hue and began to resemble raw ground beef more than a concoction of plant proteins.

Holz-Schietinger described what each ingredient added to the burger.
Wheat protein “makes up the muscle tissue that gives meat the chew,” she
said. Coconut oil “has the same melting property as tallow in an
animal.” Other ingredients, like konjac and xanthan gum, hold the
mixture together.

But heme, “this is what’s really new and novel,” Holz-Schietinger said. Heme is what makes animal blood red, and it’s found in all living things on Earth, including plants.

“Heme is identical inside a plant and in the muscle tissue of an animal,” she said. “It is the taste of blood.”

Impossible
Foods is the first food company to add heme to its vegan products in an
effort to replicate the taste, color and aroma of animal meat. It’s a
key ingredient in fooling people into thinking the veggie burgers are
made of beef. When Impossible Burgers cook in a pan, they secrete a
pinkish juice that resembles blood and they also give off a charred meat
smell. On top of that, I found the taste and texture surprisingly like a
hamburger — barnyardy, savory and fatty.

I have to say, I liked it.

Why make a veggie burger that tastes like beef?

When
Brown founded Impossible Foods, he’d given a lot of thought to the
environmental impact of mass food production — specifically meat.
Cattle farming is resource-intensive, using up vast amounts of water and
land.

Livestock factory farming uses 30 percent of the Earth’s land surface, for example, and contributes to more than 18 percent of global greenhouse gases, according to the United Nations. Almost 1,800 gallons of fresh water for drinking, feed irrigation and processing go into one pound of beef, according to National Geographic.

“Everybody wants to do the right thing when it comes to the environment — but if it doesn’t taste good, you’re not fooling anyone,” said Tal Ronnen, the chef for Crossroads Kitchen. “That’s what makes Impossible Foods such a game-changer for conscious eating.”

Brown said lab-grown burgers use fewer natural resources and generate
less greenhouse gas than beef. Additionally, the Impossible Burger
isn’t infused with antibiotics or hormones, unlike much factory-farmed
cattle. One faux burger uses a quarter of the water, five percent of the
land and emits thirteen percent of the greenhouse gases compared to a
conventional beef burger, according to Brown.

Mass meat
production is “by far the greatest threat to the global environment
right now,” Brown said. “We’ve thought a lot about how we can maximize
our impact.”

Will people buy it?

As Impossible Foods expands to more restaurants, it’s thinking beyond the burger. The company has created prototypes of other meat and dairy products and plans to launch new foods in the coming years. Brown won’t give specifics yet.

Lab-grown food has caught the attention of many big-name tech investors, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Impossible Foods has received $183 million in disclosed funding from investors like Gates, Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Beyond Meat has also received funding from Gates.

Many of these faux food startups are also beginning to sell their
products in mainstream stores. Plant-based milk company Ripple Foods
sells through Target stores across the country, and Beyond Meat is in
select Whole Foods grocery stores. On Monday, industrial meat
corporation Tyson Foods said it bought a 5 percent stake in Beyond
Meat.

Impossible
Burgers aren’t cheap, especially since they’re being exclusively sold
in upscale restaurants right now. While the lowest-cost Impossible
Burger is served at Momofuku Nishi for $12, a beef burger with fries at
the popular Shake Shack chain costs around $9. Brown said he believes
Impossible Foods’ prices will go down in time and within one year will
be on par with organic grass-fed beef. The company plans to launch in
more restaurants later this year.

Plant-based burgers are roughly
the same as cow’s meat when it comes to fat, calories and nutrition —
not exactly healthy. The Impossible Burger is modeled after 80 percent
lean and 20 percent fat ground beef. Because its burger is engineered in
a lab, scientists can tinker with some of the ratios. Holz-Schietinger
said they’ve boosted the protein, iron and B vitamins in their burgers
but the central goal is to replicate beef.

“We’re not making a veggie burger,” Holz-Schietinger said. “We’re making meat. It’s just from plants.”